GRINDERS!:

Red Sox force decisive Game 7: Varitek's clutch homer helps Boston live for another day (Ian Browne, 10/19/08, MLB.com)

Jon Lester, Mr. Consistency all year for the Sox, will take the ball Sunday night hoping to avenge a rare shaky outing in Game 3. Matt Garza, who beat Lester in that matchup, will be Tampa Bay's Game 7 starter.

To get to Lester, the Red Sox got a gritty performance by Josh Beckett, who seemed to be pitching at less than 100 percent. Beckett gave Boston five innings, allowing four hits and two runs, walking one and striking out three. The biggest clue that Beckett was hurting was the sight of Javier Lopez warming up in the bullpen throughout the fourth and Hideki Okajima following suit in the fifth.

In Beckett's final inning, he surrendered a game-tying homer to left by No. 9 hitter Jason Bartlett, who went deep just once in the regular season. Though Beckett's velocity was down to 88-90 mph for much of the inning, he was able to reach back for a 93-mph fastball to get Akinori Iwamura on a groundout to end the inning. That was all for Beckett, who threw 78 pitches.

The bullpen took it from there, setting up the much-anticipated showdown on Sunday night.

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EVENTUALLY YOU GET TO THE POINT WHERE THERE ARE JUST THREE PEOPLE IN THE VOTING BOOTH...:

It Ain't Over Till It's Over: The case against pessimism. (James Piereson, 10/27/2008, Weekly Standard)

There is some precedent in the elections of 1948, 1968, and 1976 for the kind of late in the game comeback that McCain must now try to engineer. In the tumultuous election of 1968, Senator Hubert Humphrey trailed Richard Nixon by 12 points (43 to 31 percent) in a Gallup poll published on October 22. George Wallace, the third party candidate that year, claimed 20 percent of the vote. Nixon's lead was undiminished in late October from where it stood when the campaign began in early September. Many declared the race over, as Nixon began announcing plans for the transition. Less than a week later, however, Humphrey had chiseled the lead down to 8 points (44 to 36 percent), mainly at the expense of Wallace's vote, which dropped to 15 percent.

The final Gallup poll, released on the day before the election, gave Nixon a two point lead, 42 to 40 percent--in other words, a dead heat. Humphrey surged in the last weeks of the campaign by playing upon longstanding fears among Democrats about Nixon's character and by persuading conservative Democrats to abandon Wallace. In the end, his rally fell short as Nixon won by less than 1 percent of the vote, just 500,000 votes nationwide.

Gerald Ford's furious finish against Jimmy Carter in 1976 was of a different character than the Humphrey rally, which proceeded by bringing traditional Democrats back into the fold. Ford was able to cut into -Carter's lead by appealing to independent voters who by 1976 represented more than a third of the electorate (here perhaps some precedent for McCain). Ford had trailed Carter by more than 30 points in polls taken in July and by 18 points in late August. His pardon of President Nixon in early September combined with the difficult economic conditions of the mid-1970s led many to conclude that the race was over before it even began.

Ford did not help himself with a blunder in the second presidential debate whereby he denied that Eastern Europeans lived under Soviet domination. Yet by raising questions about Carter's competence to lead and by attacking Carter's promise to pardon all Vietnam draft resisters, he cut the lead to 6 points by mid-October. On the eve of the election, the polls declared the race a dead heat. A Gallup poll taken on the last weekend of the race even gave Ford a 1 point lead, 47 to 46 percent. In the end, the structural obstacles to his campaign (a bad economy and the hangover from Watergate) were too much for Ford to overcome. He lost by two points nationally, 50 to 48 percent.

As of today, it looks like Senator Obama would match that Jimmy Carter two point win. We don't vote today.

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HE'S RIGHT TO DOUBT VARITEK:

Fastball tell-tale sign for Beckett (Buster Olney, October 18, 2008, ESPN)

Some things to look for:

1. The radar gun readings: The velocity shown on broadcasts and in the stadiums are notoriously high, say scouts who use radar, usually by three to four miles per hour. If Beckett's velocity reading on TV tonight is 93 or 94, that probably means he's throwing 90-91. If the radar gun readings are 91-92, well, that might be the sign of a problem, because it means that, as was the case in Game 2, Beckett won't have the kind of velocity needed to overpower hitters.

For example, in Game 2, he fell behind B.J. Upton 2-0, and then tried to challenge Upton with a fastball -- and Upton ripped a home run. If you see 90-91 on the radar, then Beckett's fastball is workable, but not with a caveman-like approach; he'll have to pick his spots, set up his fastball with his off-speed stuff, and use the movement on his two-seam fastball.

2. The communication between Beckett and Jason Varitek. Scouts who have trailed the Red Sox in recent weeks say when Beckett lacks confidence in his fastball, he tends to be indecisive in his pitch selection. If he's not feeling great, you might see him shake off Varitek's sign once or twice, before stepping off the mound and resetting -- and before sometimes agreeing to throw what Varitek initially asked for. "Some pitchers just work slowly, and that's just the way they are," said one advance scout. "When Beckett works slowly, for me, that's a sign of doubt."

3. Beckett could do in Game 6 what a couple of Boston pitchers did in Game 5 and make the Tampa Bay hitters move their feet.

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NOW THAT'S MORAL EQUIVALENCE!:

Class Will Tell: Why is Bill Ayers a respectable member of the upper middle class and Sarah Palin contemptible? (Sam Schulman, 10/27/2008, Weekly Standard)

Now mainstream Chicago regards Ayers as rehabilitated--but why? He hasn't, like Chuck Colson, repented, or paid his debt to society by serving a prison term. He doesn't even enjoy the prestige of a Clinton presidential pardon. Susan Rosenberg, a fellow Weatherman for whom Mrs. Ayers did go to jail rather than implicate in the execution murders of several cops, enjoys that distinction. What makes the Ayerses respectable is purely a matter of upper-middle-class solidarity. You can see the ranks close around them in the texture of Richard Stern's elegant prose. Stern, a novelist and a long-serving University of Chicago English professor, reassures us:

I've been to three or four small dinner parties with Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, once hailed as the Weather-men's Dolores Ibárruri ("La Pasionaria"), a fiery, beautiful muse. .  .  . Dohrn is still attractive, while Ayers maintains an adolescent fizzle in his sexagenarian bones.

Carefully, Stern engages with the glamorous couple on equal terms, before judging them:

At dinner, thirty-eight years later, Ayers and Dohrn did not seem to hold [my criticism of the 1970 University of Chicago student uprising] against me, and I didn't hold their fiery and criminally violent behavior against them. As in Chekhov's wonderful story "Old Age," time had planed down the sharp edges and brought one-time antagonists into each others' arms.

As the Ayerses' social equal, Stern can estimate them fairly.

As far as I know, Ayers and Dohrn are loyal to the selves which led both of them to jail (though not for long), but they were busy doing other things, useful things, Ayers as educator, Dohrn as a legal counselor. They'd raised the child of a Weatherman who'd been jailed, they were taking care of Bernardine's ill mother, they were doing many things educated community activists were doing.

What the Ayerses now teach, think, and do hardly matters as long as they observe good form, the form of "educated community activists." Stern wants us to hear a mellow Chekhovian tone in their lives (and his prose). Perhaps, but in his moral reasoning I hear Oscar Wilde's Cecily Cardew, in The Importance of Being Earnest, observing that the Ayerses "have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance."

His criticism of violence is equivalent to violence?

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THE RECIPE FOR '94:

The Audacity of Barack Obama (Charles Kesler, 10/18/08, Real Clear Politics)

Part of the past that Obama wants to transcend is the recent history of the Democratic Party. In The Audacity of Hope, his second autobiography (focused on his Senate years, not quite two of them at that point) and the source of his most thoughtful campaign speeches, he treats the party elders respectfully, but not exactly warmly. He mentions Teddy Kennedy three times, calling him one of the Senate's best storytellers; devotes a page to Al Gore's emotions after his "precipitous fall"; and acknowledges "the Kerry people" who invited him to speak at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Obama goes out of his way to emphasize that he is a newcomer to the party who couldn't even get a floor pass to the 2000 Convention. Reflecting on the elections of 2000 and 2004, he confesses that "I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation--a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago...."

Obama praises Bill Clinton more highly than any other contemporary Democrat, because Clinton recognized the staleness of the old political debate between Left and Right and came close to moving beyond it with his politics of the Third Way, which "tapped into the pragmatic, nonideological attitude of the majority of Americans." But Clinton blew it, and the author gradually lets you know it. First, he regrets Clinton's "clumsy and transparent" gestures to the Reagan Democrats, and his "frighteningly coldhearted" use of other people (e.g., "the execution of a mentally retarded death row inmate" before a crucial primary). Then Obama notes sadly that Clinton's policies--"recognizably progressive if modest in their goals"--had commanded broad public support, but that the president had never been able, "despite a booming economy," to turn that support into a governing coalition. Finally, he gently accuses Clinton of the worst offense of all: strengthening the forces of conservatism. Due to his "personal lapses" and careless triangulations that ceded more and more ground to the Right, Clinton prepared the way for George W. Bush's victory in 2000.

In his campaign speeches, Obama can't afford to be so candid--he needs Hillary and Bill's supporters, after all--but he subtly makes his point. For example, in his Acceptance Speech in Denver, the single biggest speech of the campaign, he laid at Bill Clinton's feet the oldest backhanded compliment in the books, thanking the former president "who last night made the case for change as only he can make it...." That's a disguised double insult: it reminds the discerning ear of Clinton's characteristic bloviation, and then of his political failings (when you see Clinton, you're reminded why the Democrats need Obama).

Granted, Obama holds Clinton to higher standards than he does the other party elders. Jimmy Carter, Gore, Kerry--these gentlemen lacked the political talent that Clinton squandered, in Obama's estimation, and they were innocent of political daring. Their shortcomings are palliated, to some extent, by the fact that the times were not auspicious. Still, Obama is fairly clear that if the party is to move forward it must return to earlier exemplars, and especially to its heroes who brought about major political changes lasting for a generation or more. This was the context of his comparison of Clinton to Ronald Reagan, which raised such a ruckus early in the campaign:

I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.

The comparison of Clinton to Nixon is delicious in its own right, but Obama's larger point is that Clinton was no Reagan, partly because the times were different but mostly, as he points out in his book, because Clinton was undisciplined and conceded too much to the Right. As tokens of Obama's seriousness about fundamental political change, The Audacity of Hope mentions Franklin D. Roosevelt more often that it does any living Democratic politician; and it features a long, interesting discussion of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the political point of which is to reestablish the Democrats' claim to speak for American ideals, the touchstone of every electoral realignment.

Thus the commentators who interpret Obama as a new kind of post-partisan political figure get it exactly wrong. It's true that he wants to stop "arguing about the same ole stuff," as he told Planned Parenthood; he wants to move beyond the decades-long debate between liberalism and conservatism. Bill Clinton wished for the same thing in 1992, as did George W. Bush in 2000. The 42nd and 43rd presidents had doctrines that they hoped would precipitate this magic synthesis--the Third Way, and compassionate conservatism, respectively. What's interesting, as political scientist James W. Ceaser noted in these pages ("What a Long, Strange Race It's Been," Spring 2008), is that Obama does not feel the need for such a doctrine. Nor does John McCain. The 2008 race is taking place squarely within the familiar ideological framework of liberalism and conservatism, but with McCain promising some maverick departures from the norm (while still accepting the norm), and Obama talking up hope and the need for change. The change needed, however, is for nothing less than a full-blown electoral earthquake that will permanently shatter the 50-50 America of the past four presidential elections. He thinks liberals can get beyond the old debate by finally winning it.

For folks scared of a President Obama and Democrats in control of the Executive and both chambers of Congress, the Unicorn Rider's miscalculation here should be comforting. He's rightly terrified of being seen as a stock liberal, but rather than run on the Third Way which he lauds Bill Clinton for, he's chosen to run on nothing but identity.

If it is true that his vision of victory is that it would represent a mandate for returning to the Second Way of the '30s through the '70s, rather than a mere personal affirmation, then he would almost certainly duplicate the Clinton train wreck of '93-'94. To a degree one would not have thought possible in the modern media age, Mr. Obama has benefited from being able to stay a near complete blank, a tabla rasa upon which people project their own notions of who he is and what he'd do. Inevitably, once he is forced to do anything he is going to start disillusioning people. If when he starts to act he does so in such retrograde fashion and reveals himself to be the oldest sort of liberal he will set off the same sort of psychic dissonance that Bill Clinton did with tax hikes, gays in the military, gun control, Lani Guinier's advocacy of racial spoils, Joyceln Elders's attempts to sexualize children, Hillarycare, etc.. But, where Bill Clinton was fortunate enough to have the GOP landslide summon him back to the principles he'd initially run on, what would even a blowout in 2010 do for a Barack Obama who doesn't believe in the new politics that has dominated the Anglosphere for a couple decades now?

MORE:

It’s Not Easy Bein’ Blue: America remains a center-right nation—a fact that a President Obama would forget at his peril. (Jon Meacham, 10/27/08, NEWSWEEK)

It is easy—for some, even tempting—to detect the dawn of a new progressive era in the autumn of Barack Obama's campaign for the presidency. Eight years of Republican rule have produced two seemingly endless wars, an economy in recession, a giant federal intervention in the financial sector and a nearly universal feeling of unease in the country (86 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with how things are going, and 73 percent disapprove of the president's performance). Obama—a man who has yet to complete his fourth year in the United States Senate—is leading John McCain, and Democrats may gain seats on Capitol Hill. In 2007, the Pew Research Center published a 112-page report subtitled "Political Landscape More Favorable to Democrats," and the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 55 percent believe Obama's views are neither too liberal nor too conservative but are "about right."

But history, as John Adams once said of facts, is a stubborn thing, and it tells us that Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Carter to Clinton usually wind up moving farther right than they thought they ever would, or they pay for their continued liberalism at the polls. Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that "the majority is to govern" has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans.

The pattern has deep roots. FDR had a longish run (from 1933 to 1937), but he lost significant ground in the 1938 midterm elections and again in the largely forgotten wartime midterms of 1942. After he defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964, LBJ had only two years of great success (Ronald Reagan won the California governorship in 1966) before Vietnam, and the white backlash helped elect Richard Nixon in 1968. Jimmy Carter lasted only a term, and Bill Clinton's Democrats were crushed in the 1994 elections. The subsequent success of his presidency had as much to do with reforming welfare and managing the prosperity of the technology boom as it did with advancing traditional Democratic causes. [...]

According to the NEWSWEEK Poll, nearly twice as many people call themselves conservatives as liberals (40 percent to 20 percent), and Republicans have dominated presidential politics—in many ways the most personal, visceral vote we cast—for 40 years. Since 1968, Democrats have won only three of 10 general elections (1976, 1992 and 1996), and in those years they were led by Southern Baptist nominees who ran away from the liberal label. "Is this a center-right country? Yes, compared to Europe or Canada it's obviously much more conservative," says Adrian Wooldridge, coauthor of "The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America" and Washington bureau chief of the London-based Economist. "There's a much higher tolerance for inequality, much greater cultural conservatism, a higher incarceration rate, legalized handguns and greater distrust of the state."

The terms we use in discussing politics and culture can be elusive and elastic. The conservative label is often applied to people of all sorts and conditions: libertarians, evangelical Christians, tax cutters, military hawks. (There are just as many, if not more, varieties of liberal.) But in broad strokes I mean "conservative" in the way most of us have come to use it in recent decades: to describe those who value custom over change, who worry about the erosion of the familiar and the expansion of the state, and who dislike those who appear condescending about matters of faith, patriotism and culture. (In other words, think of figures ranging from Edmund Burke to Thomas Jefferson to David Brooks to Sarah Palin. It is an eclectic crew.)

The argument I am making—that we are at heart a right-leaning country skeptical of government once a crisis that requires government has passed—is probably going to look dumb, or at least out of step, for many months to come.

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PRESIDENT KERRY SAYS, "THE ONE IS A LOCK":

Will a funny thing happen on the way to Washington? (Edward Luce, October 17 2008, Financial Times)

To judge by some, although by no means all, of the recent polls, Mr Obama may even pull off a 1980-style Ronald Reagan landslide. Parts of America, such as North Carolina and Virginia, which last elected a Democrat when Mr Obama was in diapers, show him in the lead by ground-shifting margins.

Then there is the money. No candidate has ever raised anything like Mr Obama’s tally, which could exceed $600m (£350m, €450m) if the recent escalation in donations is any guide. By my estimate, Mr Obama’s remaining war chest could fund at least two back-to-back British general elections. Mr McCain, meanwhile, might be able to finance a creditable shot at the New Jersey governorship.

Nor, in spite of the acuity of Mr McCain’s punchline, would a dramatic stock market recovery be likely to dent Mr Obama’s fortunes. It would come too late to restore the American public’s badly shaken confidence in their financial system and in the free-trade economy that Mr McCain so gallantly defends.

Besides, no resurgence in the Dow Jones could reflate a property market that has been the chief source of household spending since the Bush administration took office. Mr Obama can rest easy: Joe Public – and even Joe Plumber – will be feeling the pain for many months to come.

Yet conventional wisdom is often wrong. For a start, as any property analyst can attest, it tends to be self-affirming. The media has leapt on recent polls that show Mr Obama with double-digit margins. But until Friday, when the conservative Drudge Report led on the much narrower two-point lead that Gallup gave Mr Obama, those polls that have not hinted at a landslide have been downplayed. And there have been quite a few.

The RealClear Politics website’s average of polls, which gives Mr Obama a lead of 6.8 per cent over Mr McCain, offers a better guide to the situation. It compares to John Kerry’s lead just a few weeks before he lost the 2004 election to Mr Bush. It is also slightly lower than Mr Obama’s lead over Hillary Clinton shortly before she bested him – and the media – in the New Hampshire primary at the start of the year.

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ALONG THE AXIS:

Indian flavour aboard US Navy vessel (Andrew Pereira,10/19/08, TNN)

ONBOARD USS CHANCELLORSVILLE: American officers and sailors aboard the USS Chancellorsville, now docked at Mormugao harbour for the joint Indo-US naval exercise Malabar '08 starting Sunday, woke up Saturday morning to the sounds of bhangra playing over the public address system.

In fact, the person who guided the ship into Mormugao harbour was an officer of Indian-origin.

"I was the conning officer at the bridge, guiding the guy at the helm when we entered the harbour," says 22-year-old George Kunthara, who traces his roots to Palakkad, Kerala.

"My parents went to the US almost 30 years ago. I was born and raised in Austin, Texas," he says.

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NO POUNDS, NO JUSTICE:

The final victory is not yet won: No one will be more pleased at the news that there may be no more prosecutions for selling goods in pounds and ounces than all those readers whose support over the past eight years has made the campaign to end the absurdity of the compulsory metrication laws possible. (Christopher Booker, 18 Oct 2008, Daily Telegraph)

The announcement by business minister John Denham that local authorities are to be instructed never again to charge small traders with the criminal offence of selling in traditional British weights and measures seems like a remarkable victory for the tireless campaign led by Neil Herron of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund.

It was Mr Herron who, in June 2000, was the first to leap into the fray when, for selling 'a pound of bananas', his fellow Sunderland market trader Steve Thoburn became the first person in Britain to face prosecution under new regulations, implementing two EU directives, making it an offence to sell except in metric measures.

When four other traders soon fell similarly foul of the new law, it was Mr Herron who set up the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund to provide them with proper legal support for a case which went right up to the Court of Appeal, And, as he is first to acknowledge, without the generosity of those Sunday Telegraph readers who over the years have contributed more than £100,000, his brilliantly orchestrated campaign could never have got off the ground.

But before we cheer too loudly at this latest news, we must recall that Mr Denham is only proposing to give new 'guidance' to local councils, on an issue long an embarrassment to the Government because it arouses such public passion.

The laws under which the original 'metric martyrs' were found guilty are still on the statute book...

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THE TRUE ROLE OF RACE IN THE CAMPAIGN IS REVEALED BY A SIMPLE THOUGHT EXPERIMENT...:

On The Content of His Character: If Obama loses, let's please not assume that racism was the cause. (John McWhorter, 10/16/08, The New Republic)

I find myself unable to trust that more than a sliver of black America would be able, if Obama lost, to assess that outcome according to--of all things--the content of his character.

For 40 years, black America has been misled by a claim that we can only be our best with the total eclipse of racist bias. Few put it in so many words, but the obsession with things like tabulating ever-finer shades of racism and calling for a "national conversation" on race in which whites would listen to blacks talk about racism are based on an assumption: that the descendants of African slaves in the United States are the only group of humans in history whose problems will vanish with a "level playing field," something no other group has ever supposed could be a reality.

The general conversation is drifting slowly away from this Utopianist canard, but nothing could help hustle it into obsolescence more than an Obama presidency, especially for the generation who grew up watching a black man and his family in the White House and had little memory of a time when it would have been considered an impossibility. At the same time, nothing could breathe new life into this gestural pessimism like an Obama loss. It would be the perfect enabler for a good ten years of aggrieved mulling over "the persistence of racism," which, for all of its cathartic seduction, would make no one less poor, more gainfully employed, or better educated.

The prevailing sentiment would be expressed in tart declarations, considered the height of black authenticity, that bigotry did in the Obama campaign. Even now, the idea that white swing voters might pass on him because of his positions or campaign performance is considered a peculiar notion, likely from someone unhip to the gospel that America remains all about racism despite Colin Powell and Oprah. The money question is considered to be why our Great Black Hope isn't polling tens of points ahead of John McCain and his discredited party. But Obama has been a sure shot only with Blue America college-town sorts, animated not only by Obama's intellect, but also by his "diverseness" and its symbolic import for showing that our nasty past is truly past.

Obama, in fact, has limitations as a communicator beyond black people and the "Stuff White People Like" set. In his first debate with John McCain, when McCain assailed him as a big spender, Obama was almost strangely uninterested in pointing up the things he wants to spend money on--i.e., exactly the things needed by the struggling working class people he has trouble making inroads with. Luckily, he's gotten past this some recently (see his calling health care a "right" during the second debate and his brass-tacks speech in Toledo on Monday). However, overall, professorial Obama still seems oblivious to the power of slogans. Reagan had "Morning in America"; Bill Clinton had "The End of Welfare As We Know It." Obama has had the likes of the gauzy "Yes, We Can," stirring as an opening gambit and good on T-shirts, but offering little to the folks facing layoffs while trying to pay their mortgage. To struggling black folks, ethnic identification pushes Obama over the edge regardless. But all folks aren't black.

...just imagine how Senator Obama would have done in the primaries if he were white and running on such a vacuous "platform." He'd have finished behind even such a notorious empty suit as Joe Biden.

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THE FED JUST KEEPS FIGHTING THE WRONG WAR:

Amid Pressing Problems, Threat of Deflation Looms (SUDEEP REDDY, 10/18/08, Wall Street Journal)

Policy makers navigating the U.S. through the global credit crisis may have a new concern on the horizon for 2009: deflation.

The risk of deflation -- generally falling prices across the economy, beyond volatile energy and food costs -- remains slim. But the financial shock and a faltering economy can set the stage for a deflationary environment.

Federal Reserve officials view broad-based deflation as unlikely but possible. Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Janet Yellen said in a speech this week that the plunge in oil prices along with slackening demand for labor and goods should "push inflation down to, and possibly even below, rates that I consider consistent with price stability."

Fed officials generally consider price stability to be an inflation rate between 1.5% and 2%.

The long term pressure on the economy remains, as it has been for nearly three decades, deflationary, not inflationary.

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MEDICINE'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET...:

Why "placebo" is not a dirty word: Yes, alternative medicine works mostly by the power of suggestion. But so do a lot of conventional treatments. (Robert Burton, Aug. 01, 2008, Salon)

The placebo effect has maddened the medical world for generations. But recent advances in brain imaging emphasize for me that “placebo” should not be regarded a dirty word. In fact, it is time to give placebo a new image and update its beneficial role in our modern medical armamentarium.

Folk psychology tells us that the placebo effect is, in large part, a function of patient suggestibility and that some of us are clearly more suggestible than others. For centuries, physicians have handed out inert colored water and sugar pills with the full knowledge that approximately a third of their patients will report feeling better. We assume that the degree of response is somehow a reflection of the psychological state of the patient -- the greater the degree of gullibility, the more likely he or she is to believe that a sugar pill will relieve aches and pains. But there's an unanticipated side effect of this assumption.

Attributing the placebo effect to gullibility is a subtle accusation of a patient's weakness and lack of sophistication. I suspect that many of us consciously or unconsciously look down upon those who are good placebo responders, as though you have to be a real dummy to believe everything the doctor tells or gives you.

But placebo serves a very real evolutionary function. At a time when there were no medicines, the placebo effect was all that stood between primitive humans and the agonies of injuries and illnesses. A look at the functional imaging scans shows how truly robust are the involved brain systems. These systems are here to stay. Even given our advanced state of medical knowledge, much of routine medical care -- from treating backaches to the common cold -- relies primarily upon reassurance and hope, not disease-specific treatments.

Given the choice, we'd all prefer to be placebo responders, though none of us want to be categorized as rubes. We complain about not getting enough quality time with our doctors, yet would never dream of directly asking for a prescription for a placebo. Instead, if we believe in conventional (allopathic) medicine, we might ask for an antibiotic for the common cold, with the rationale that, yes, it's only a virus, but perhaps the antibiotic will help. If we are inclined toward alternative medical treatments, we will plunk down a few bucks for a bottle of echinacea or a pack of zinc lozenges. To the extent that we feel better, we have invoked the placebo effect.

Keep in mind that whenever there is no specific well-substantiated treatment for a condition, the only alternative to glum acceptance and the proverbial stiff upper lip is to seek out a placebo. But don't tell us it's a placebo. Don't even hint that we are self-deluded suckers who might spring for a case of snake oil or a six-pack of eye of newt. Just as religion softens the blow of facing death, placebo softens the blow of facing life.

...is that it's placebo all the way down. Doctors can deaden pain, they just can't cure much.

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THE RITUAL AS REVOLUTION:

The Right’s Class War: The prospect of a McCain loss has the Republican Party angrily turning on itself. Can the eggheads and the Joe Six-Packs get along? (John Heilemann, Oct 17, 2008, New York)

With the prospect of defeat for John McCain growing more likely every day, the GOP destined to see its numbers reduced in both the House and Senate, and the Republican brand debased to the point of bankruptcy, the conservative intelligentsia is factionalized and feuding, criminating and recriminating, in a way that few of its members can recall in their political lifetimes. Populists attack Establishmentarians. Neocons assail theocons. And virtually everyone has something harsh to say about the party’s standard-bearer. Election Day may still be two weeks away, but already the idea-merchants of the right have formed a circular firing squad.

When the weapons of choice shift from pistols to Uzis after November 4, the ensuing massacre will be for Democrats a source of political opportunity, not to mention endless entertainment. But for Republicans it will be a necessary passage toward either the revival or reinvention of conservatism. Nobody serious on the right doubts that the overhaul is at once required and bound to be arduous—but it may take longer and prove even bloodier than anyone now imagines.

[P]alin retains the fierce loyalty of a cadre of more populist, grassrootsy voices in the right-wing punditocracy who have denounced the main-line-conservative criticisms of Palin as the snooty, disloyal, and craven attempts of faux Republicans to curry favor with the ascendant liberal elite. “They … believe as intellectuals,” writes one pro-Palin opinionator, Victor Davis Hanson, “that the similarly astute Obamians may on occasion inspire, or admire them as the like-minded who cultivate the life of the mind—in contrast to the ‘cancer’ Sarah Palin, who, with her husband Todd, could hardly discuss Proust with them or could offer little if any sophisticated table talk other than the proper chokes on shotguns or optimum RPMs on snow-machines.”

Not surprisingly, Sarracuda’s foes on the right dismiss the counter-backlash more or less out of hand. When I ask Frum about the apparent class overtones of the anti-anti-Palin argument, he deems it a mere “rhetorical trope.” What he hears instead is the sound of defeatism. “The people who defend her have already given up any serious thought of Republicans’ wielding governmental power anytime soon,” Frum says. “They have already moved to a position of pure cultural symbolic opposition to a new majority. The people who criticize her do so because we have some hope that we could be in contention in 2012, and there’s some risk that she could be the party’s nominee, and she’d probably lose—and even if by some miracle she won, she’d be a terrible president.”

Brooks, meanwhile, detects a “more visceral” impulse at work. “There are some folks who live by the culture war and die by the culture war,” he tells me. “And if a bunch of East Coast snobs hate Palin, they should like Palin.” But Brooks, like Frum, sees the internecine fight over McCain’s No. 2 as reflecting a deeper set of ideological fissures in the party. “Basically, the people who are down on Palin and the campaign McCain is running think that it’s time to move beyond Reagan and that we’ve got to go off and do something new,” he explains. “A lot of the people who are defending the campaign and Palin think that we got out of touch with Goldwater and Reagan and we’ve gotta get back to that.”

Bingo! The neocons have always been uncomfortable with the GOP on cultural issues, which, of course, represent the party's core convictions. But every four years they pick the candidate they think least threatening on such issues -- in other words, most likely to allow abortion -- and then back him as he loses to the more religious party work horse. That's why they backed John McCain against George W. Bush but then Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani against Maverick.

So in the next election they'll have some new "moderate" who they'll trumpet as he gets thrashed by Jeb Bush, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal or whoever. And they'll bitch and moan about how we've nominated someone too stupid to govern without ever comprehending that it's the Stupid Party and we don't do "new."

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STICKING TO THE KNITTING:

Hodes, Horn find little common ground in debate (GARRY RAYNO, 10/18/08, New Hampshire Union Leader)

Social Security and whether individuals should be able to invest some of their money in securities brought out two different solutions.

Hodes refused to say exactly what he would support "" such as an older retirement age -- to shore up the Social Security trust fund, but said a comprehensive approach is needed. He said privatization was not an option.

"The first step is to restore fiscal responsibility to make sure the federal government does not take any more money out of the trust fund," he said.

Horn said people need more choices in how to invest their retirement dollars, but said...she would not mandate that everyone do that. [...]

Horn repeatedly attached Hodes for taking contributions from financial institutions while he sits on the House Financial Oversight Committee.

"During the recent economic mess Mr. Hodes and his committee and his party looked the other way," she charged. "That's the kind of inaction that hurts people every day." [...]

Hodes said another stimulus package is needed, as well as reforming bankruptcy laws to allow more people to remain in their homes.

But she replied "The best stimulus we've got to offer the American people is to leave more money in their pockets."

Ms Horn recognizes that George W. Bush won two national elections, eh?

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THAT'LL TEACH 'EM TO PUT ON AIRS:

U.S. strike is said to kill Al-Qaida figure in Pakistan (New York Times, 10/17/2008)

The operative, Khalid Habib, an Egyptian who was chief of operations in Pakistan's tribal region, is described by the CIA as the fourth-ranking person in the Qaida hierarchy. [...]

Habib recently moved to Taparghai from Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, which is in an area that the Americans have been attacking with increasing frequency. Their primary goal is to break the militant network there related to Sirajuddin Haqqani, a Taliban leader closely allied to Al-Qaida, the former member of the militant group said.

Habib had relocated to Taparghai expressly to avoid missile strikes, the former militant said. The area around Taparghai is near Makin, a base of Baitullah Mehsud, the chief of the Pakistani Taliban.

Habib was in a parked Toyota four-by-four when he was hit by the missile.

Seems like you could just blow up any Toyota 4x4 you can find in Waziristan and stand a reasonable chance that its carrying bad guys.

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THE ONE THNG EVERYONE AGREES ON...:

Al-Qaeda Web Forums Abruptly Taken Offline: Separately, Sunnis and Shiites Wage Online War (Ellen Knickmeyer, 10/18/08, Washington Post )

Four of the five main online forums that al-Qaeda's media wing uses to distribute statements by Osama bin Laden and other extremists have been disabled since mid-September, monitors of the Web sites say.

The disappearance of the forums on Sept. 10 -- and al-Qaeda's apparent inability to restore them or create alternate online venues, as it has before -- has curbed the organization's dissemination of the words and images of its fugitive leaders. On Sept. 29, a statement by the al-Fajr Media Center, a distribution network created by supporters of al-Qaeda and other Sunni extremist groups, said the forums had disappeared "for technical reasons," and it urged followers not to trust look-alike sites.

For al-Qaeda, "these sites are the equivalent of pentagon.mil, whitehouse.gov, att.com," said Evan F. Kohlmann, an expert on online al-Qaeda operations who has advised the FBI and others. With just one authorized al-Qaeda site still in business, "this has left al-Qaeda's propaganda strategy hanging by a very narrow thread." [...]

On several occasions over the past three years, unknown hackers have shut down al-Qaeda-affiliated Web sites after they announced the imminent release of a new video message from Osama bin Laden or another extremist leader. It is often impossible to pinpoint the source of such online attacks, though some experts say the culprits could be independent activists.

...is that the CIA isn't competent enough to be behind it.

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